“It was true.”
“I am glad to hear it. Some people said he was making it up. Some people didn’t even believe he had gone to England, though he came back with printed books to show. He came back and waited for the English people to come out here and build houses. Every year or so somebody came out. Not by the way you came, but by the other way, the savannah way I told you about. They always brought the same message to my grandfather: next year, next year. Is that the kind of message you will be bringing us?”
“No,” the narrator says. “It’s going to be different this time. We are different people.”
“People began to mock my grandfather. They said he was going to get us in trouble with the government for nothing at all. One time when an Englishman came out there was an eclipse of the moon. You know what people do when that happens? They shoot flaming arrows at the moon, to light it up again. My grandfather was ashamed. He told me so. He begged the Englishman to forgive them for behaving in that childish way. But the Englishman only laughed and said that there would be no trouble with the government. What you have just said. He said that the place was good for houses. It is what I hear people are telling Alfred now. And then something happened. There was a war or something, I suppose, and English people stopped coming. Nobody came even to say ‘next year.’ But my grandfather never stopped believing that they would come back. He went foolish with that belief, but there are people who still believe that. Lucas believes. And I’ll tell you something. Kanaima has come for Lucas. You know that. He must have told you. He told me he told you. And when kanaima came for Lucas, he said, ‘I will get away. I know that. I will go to England. My grandfather’s friend will send for me.’ And now you have come. Did Lucas tell you? They used to send clothes for my grandfather. Not our kind of clothes, but modern clothes, for the houses they were going to build. I still have some of them. Let me show you.”
He undid the bundle beside him. A wild-banana leaf, cured in some way, with its browned ribs giving the effect of papyrus, was folded over the garment. He lifted out the material, fawn-coloured, perished, but recognizably a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred and fifty years before, relic of an old betrayal.
4. Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties
I THOUGHT THAT before I settled into the writing of this book I should go and look at old scenes. And, when I was in Trinidad, I did the longish drive one day to the north-easternmost point of the island, Point Galera, Galley Point. Columbus gave the name.
An asphalt lane led off the main road to the Point itself. After the forest of the last few miles, the lane felt high and exposed. The light was harder; the asphalt looked very black; you could hear the wind and the sea. Half-stripped old coconut trees were on one side of the lane, untrimmed bush on the other side, with many young guava trees (no doubt seeded by birds, always overhead), and with a wind-blown drift of browned newspaper and bleached, flattened cardboard packets.
At the end of the lane was a disused lighthouse. A little way up its cracked white bulk it was marked — in raised plaster or concrete — with a date, 1897, a simple diamond shape, and the letters VDJ. The letters stood for “Victoria Diamond Jubilee.” It was a double celebration: 1897 was not only the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria; it was also the centenary of the British conquest of Trinidad from the Spaniards.
A path led down the broken cliff to the rocks the lighthouse used to warn against. Some young black men and boys (immigrants, legal and illegal, from the small islands to the north) were standing or sitting on the upper rocks and looking down at a man who, with a footing just above the spray, was fishing for baby shark, with the help of an assistant.
The assistant stood a safer distance away, higher up and a little to one side of his principal, and took the strain of the line when a shark bit. The hooked shark looked small and playful in the white water between the rocks, really a baby, not strong or smart, not worth catching. But after it had been landed and killed it looked big and heavy, especially when the assistant — as serious as his master and the silent watchers (scattered about the rocks, as if for privacy, each watcher with his tight midday shadow) — lifted the shark on to his shoulder to take it up to where the rest of the catch was.
Wind and beating sea, over the centuries, had caused the cliff to crumble at this Point. But plant life hung on wherever it could. A kind of grass had knitted itself together into depressions in the upper rocks. On rock formations a few hundred feet out in the sea, long ago cut off from the Point, strange-looking trees, wet with the spray, stunted and twisted by the wind, stood firm, and even now would have been screening the young trees that would in time replace them.
I couldn’t have put a name to the trees. They were not part of the imported vegetation we knew very well, like the coconut, mango, breadfruit, bamboo. The trees on the rocks flourished where they did because they were native to those rocks, the Point, the island, the continent. And it occurred to me that, in spite of everything that had happened here, in spite of everything at our backs, what I was looking at was, miraculously, a version of the very first thing Columbus had seen after his crossing of the Atlantic on his third voyage: not the same rocks, but rocks created out of those he had seen, and wind-beaten trees like the ones before me, ten or twelve or fifteen cycles before.
The story was that he had called the point the Galley, Galera, because what he had seen looked like “a galley under sail.” There is no such shape on the island itself, in this northeastern part; and in the nineteenth century, after the island had become a British colony, people began to feel that the old maps had got it wrong, that in the two hundred and fifty years of depopulation and wilderness that had followed the discovery — the island ravaged at the edges, never properly settled or administered or explored by the Spaniards — knowledge of Columbus’s landfall had been lost. The “galley” Columbus had seen was thought to refer to a formation on a long sandspit at the south-eastern tip of the island.
But I thought now, looking down with the others at the shark-fishing in the bloodied white water between the rocks, and looking beyond that to the rocks and the twisted trees out in the sea, that I was seeing what Columbus had seen. He would have seen the cliff and the rocks and the beating sea from far out. He would have kept well clear of the Point. A few hours’ sailing would have taken him to the easier south-eastern tip of the island; just around that, and now close enough to the shore to see the vegetable gardens of the people, he would have seen the three low hills that would have suggested the name of the Trinity for the island. A few hours on from that, he would have had his first glimpse of the South American continent. He would have taken it for another island, and given it the name of Gracia, Grace.
Things had gone badly for him. He hadn’t on his two previous journeys found much gold, and the colony he had founded on Haiti had gone wrong. Now, third time lucky with the sighting of new territory, his thoughts were of religion and redemption, of things at last being put right for him. But until just a few hours before, he had been more of a sailor; and to his fifteenth-century Mediterranean eyes the black rocks and twisted trees off the point of the island would have reminded him of a galley under saiclass="underline" the rocks standing for the galley, the twisted trees standing for the sails.